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List of world featherweight boxing champions

Wikimedia list article

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 8, 2026
Entity authorityQ2611479 ↗
Source-derived summary

Championship recognition

Public acclamation: 1884 to 1921

Champions were recognized by wide public acclamation. A featherweight champion was a boxer who had a notable win over another notable boxer and then went without defeat. Retirements from the ring periodically led to a "true" champion going unrecognized, or for several being recognized by the public for periods of time. Typically, public interest in having a single, "true" champion resulted in claimants to the featherweight title being matched with one another; the winner of that bout was subsequently deemed the champion, with the claim (and title lineage) of the defeated boxer largely forgotten.

Sanctioning bodies: 1921 to present

The National Boxing Association (NBA) was formed in 1921 as the first organization aimed at regulating boxing on a national (and later global) level. The prominence of New York City as the epicenter of boxing would lead to a governmental entity, the powerful New York State Athletic Commission (NYSAC), joining the NBA in sanctioning bouts as "world championships." A third entity, with lesser public recognition inside the US, the European Boxing Union (EBU), would follow suit, with this triumvirate typically (but not always) recognizing the same boxers as world champions.

At its 1962 convention, the NBA's non-U.S. members exploited a membership rule and took control of the organization, rebranding it the World Boxing Association. The WBA was joined a year later by a combination of state and national boxing commissions (including the NYSAC and IBU) to form a separate sanctioning body, the World Boxing Council (WBC). Each organization would later have a spin-off competing sanctioning body emerge: the International Boxing Federation (IBF), which was formed by members of the United States Boxing Association in 1983; and the World Boxing Organization (WBO), which was formed in 1989. A fifth significant (but not as publicly accepted) body came in the form of the International Boxing Organization (IBO), in 1991.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “List of world featherweight boxing champions” is wikimedia list article. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through List, world and featherweight, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1884, 1921, 1962, 1983—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, List, world and featherweight is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “wikimedia list article” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2611479. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1884, 1921, 1962 and 1983.

Critical limits

Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “List of world featherweight boxing champions” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.